AOL, Time Warner Merger Finalized

Jan. 12 -- It's official. America Online and Time Warner are hitched, making this power couple the country’s largest media empire.

The two companies moved quickly to close the deal Thursday night once the federal regulators had given final approval. Before dawn, the company was hard at work changing the log on the Time Warner Web site, issuing new business cards and putting up new signs at both companies’ headquarters this morning.

The new business, AOL Time Warner, joins the nation’s largest online firm — with 26 million subscribers — to the nation’s biggest media and entertainment company, creating a multimedia colossus that owns such popular titles as CNN, HBO, Sports Illustrated and Warner Bros.

"We want to be a different kind of company, a partnership really, with government and nonprofit groups," Chief Executive of the new company Steve Case told ABCNEWS this morning. "We want to make it more affordable for consumers to get information, to see entertainment, to be informed about a variety of products, to be educated by a variety of different topics. We think it's a world of convergence."

However, the FCC’s approval came with three conditions designed to help regulate competition in some areas where consumer groups had expressed concern — high-speed Internet services delivered over cable, instant messaging and Time Warner’s ownership link with AT&T.

Consumer Groups Praise Conditions of Deal

In the year since the merger was announced, AOL and Time Warner have made various concessions to win approval from regulators in the United States and Europe as the companies' combined value dropped some 40 percent from $165 billion in a slowing stock market. For example, under pressure from European regulators, Time Warner abandoned plans to merge with the record label EMI.

But Gerald Levin, who was chief executive of Time Warner and is now the chairman of the new business, said the long wait has helped the companies prepare to merge.

“What I like about his past year is it’s given us the time for everyone to come together,” he said this morning on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. “We’ve actually had a year of integration, of organization and now we’re going to hit the ground running.”